phoneutria wrote:Zoots release date is 01/24/2018 according to the Virginia Department of Corrections website.

Thanks!

"Someone may object that the successful revolt against the universal and homogeneous state could have no other effect than that the identical historical process which has led from the primitive horde to the final state will be repeated. But would such a repetition of the process--a new lease of life for man's humanity--not be preferable to the indefinite continuation of the inhuman end? Do we not enjoy every spring although we know the cycle of the seasons, although we know that winter will come again?" (Leo Strauss, "Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero".)

Ok thats good news.Pezer and I were going to pick him up and all that we thought but things went the other way. An other way. Anyway I hope he shows up online. And he should write a book now, for real.

Like Being In Prison Under TrumpRegardless of what it is about so it sells.Free adviceinvite me for champagne on the jet later

Zoot Allures wrote:back in october of 2015 i was told by a police officer it was illegal to sleep in a vehicle in the city (which i was doing at the time). i then contacted the sex offender compliance officer and told him this information. he agreed to let me park elsewhere, and that if an officer came by the walmart parking lot to verify my address, and i wasn't there, he'd simply call me, and i'd tell him where i was. however, the trooper that does this was not told by the compliance officer that i was given permission to do this. fast forward a couple weeks; i get a strange call from the officer asking me to come down to the station and fix an address registration issue. i didn't buy it. thought he was trying to lure me down there to arrest me. thought the trooper had looked for me at the walmart and issued an arrest warrant when i wasn't found. so i didn't go in. said fuck it, i'm goin' on the lam. that's when i feel most alive, anyway.

now, because i was on the run, i wouldn't work a real job; don't want to risk a employer finding the warrant and turning me in. sheriff rolls up on the job one day and corners me. we don't want that. so, i needed a lucrative way to make money illegally, and, not wanting to resort to violent means, i began boosting.. or hittin' licks. for those unfamiliar with the criminal idiom, this means stealing shit outta vehicles.

by the end of the month i had fences set up in three different cities; shady pawn shop owners, flea market vendors, drug dealers, phone refurbishers. they bought the shit i stole. electronics, clothing, jewelry, whatever you find in vehicles. i had it down to a science. i'd go to a city, reconnoiter the area with google maps; find apartment complexes next to neighborhoods. i'd park in a guest spot that night and sleep until 2:30. i'd then suit up and hit the neighborhood while all the respectable but benign, hard working middle-upper class white people were dreaming of sugar plums. i'd do up to fifty cars a night. work one side of the street and then the other. every vehicle was unlocked. by 4:45 i was done. people start to wake up around that time. i'd make my way back to the van and inventory my merchandise. take pictures of each item and bookmark a link to the item on ebay to get the average going price. completely professional; all my customers loved my work. i'd send the pic and the link to them. i provide a quality product at an affordable price with the convenience of never having to leave your living room sofa to see it.

long story short, one night somebody nearly busted me. i just opened the car door as they were walking out of the house. they saw me, so i split. called the cops. i didn't think anything of it because i was literally out there like a ninja; dressed in black with gps. i could disappear before you could quote an anarchist and say 'property is theft'. so i keep working the neighborhood. little do i know a fucking canine unit comes out to the neighborhood with like nine other cops. eventually i see them crusing the streets, up and down, so i head back to the van and call it a night. i move the van to another spot to break the scent trail and throw the dog off.. then, for whatever reason- maybe because i was jacked on adderall- i WENT BACK to the neighborhood to watch them try to find me. i got a kick outta this... watching the dog handler pass the shepherd over the fences i jumped and get confused by the backtracking i did to mix the dog up. anyway, i fucking walked right out in front of a patrol car i didn't see and got cornered. they swarmed me, tackled me, cuffed me, and cussed me.

all in all they did alright. used a boxing method in which units drive parallel down two blocks to trap me between streets in somebody's back yard. units would watch the street to catch me crossing... then the dog would find me where i was trapped behind the house. they boxed me in. nice work, boys. at the station we discussed this; i gave them some tips too. the one cop wasn't watching his rearview as he crept along, and i darted across the street as soon as he passed. you gotta keep an eye on what is behind you as well. duh. still i made it clear that i had gotten away and that i was caught because i CAME BACK.

so now i'm charged with a failure to register, a false information, and some breaking and entering/larceny. no problem, except i would'nt of been doing all this if that ass ranger compliance officer woulda told the trooper to call me if he didn't find me at the walmart.

... and the 'false information' was a bogus charge: i did not give them false information. i registered the actual address of the walmart... but they said i didn't write 'in the parking lot'. did i have to write this? where did they think i was sleeping, in the fucking sporting goods aisle of the walmart? of course i'm in the parking lot you stupid fucktard! in any case, i may have given INCOMPLETE information, but not FALSE information. i was convicted of it anyway. scared to fight it; if i took it to trial and lost, i'da gotten five years for it. accepted another plea bargain under duress. story of my life; pleading guilty to crimes i did not commit (as per statute).

that being said, when the criminal justice system betrays you, your social contract with the state is voided (see locke and hobbes). part of the civil contract is the obligation of government to behave itself. if it breaks the rules, you can break the rules. if you do not receive the rights, privileges, and luxuries of other citizens, you are no longer subject to society's laws, ipso facto exacto.

if you don't want your shit stolen, petition your government to tighten the fuck up.

besides, if you people would lock your fucking car doors, their would be far less vehicle break-ins. christ, you practically handed the shit to me.

Zoot Allures wrote:the inmates are like putty in my hands. once it becomes established that i am the most intelligent in any block i'm in (maybe this is only because the inmates are so stupid? see, i can be modest), i am not bothered with trivial banter anymore. it doesn't take long before i am recognized as the authority in any conversation about something other than hip-hop 'artists' and football. this is a great responsibility as well as a privilege, but something else too; i realize that i can make them believe what i want them to believe, so i become maieutic in my approach. i ask myself what kind of person each inmate is, and then i decide what i want them to believe according to how i think they might become better. if i find one who demonstrates rebelious attitudes toward government, i enhance them, make them better anarchists. i turn misogynists into lovers of women. i turn directionless white trash into focused and devoted white supremacists. the religious; i challenge muslims, five-percenters, moorish science templers and christians alike... not to take anything away from them as much as force them to learn how to defend their beliefs and convictions against expert arguments and objections. what do i care about what is 'true' or not? there is no 'truth', only quantums of strength, awareness and ambition. the rest is irrelevant.

now, depending on the inmate's situation, i exercise some degree of mercy. for example, an inmate just receives a life sentence in court. it is not my intention to strip him of his last remaining 'hope' in life, his hope and faith in christianity, let's say. rather, i provide for him an alternative theory which is better than what he believes, e.g., multiverse many-worlds theory in which he is already immortal and simultaneously existing in an infinite number of lives in which each course of events is different, and so on. i can make him believe it, and when he lays awake the entire night thinking, i know my work is done.

again, what do i care if this is true or not? what i care about is shaking him up, making him uncomfortable, empowering him, transforming him and filling him with a new kind of strength. i make diamonds out of dirt. i make monsters better monsters.

it would be an unjustified cruelty to convince him that christianity is nonsense without providing for him something greater to believe in... and yet this person means absolutely nothing to me. this degenerate reprobate could hang himself that night and i wouldn't lose any sleep. if he isn't going to hang himself, i might as well see what i can make of him.

i suppose this is all experimental to me. i no longer concern myself with improving the world; those improvers of mankind have gone underground and have everything under control. even being the case that the herd generally consists of the menial working classes, the lumpen proletariat class, and the parasite class of criminals, these numbers mean nothing. the base of a society will always consist of these types, and they serve no other purpose than to support the foundation upon which an elite class might grow.

what is the point of all this? good question. it must be this: i no longer believe in the possibility of a sociological reconstructing of man, but rather the hyper-decline of the average type. i wish to 'kick what is already falling', to encourage the collapse of order and government... not for the sake of forcing man into extinction, but for the sake of forcing greater, more competent authority to evolve through necessity so that man does not perish. there is more than one way to make an age golden again.

btw, my type and experience is unique. i am the synthesis of the criminal and the ruler, and as such i am the authority on both. one understands neither without understanding both, without being both.

i've always known at heart i was an anarcho-fascist. indeed, the very concept belonged to me first, as i was the first to conceive of it. a paradox that upon further introspection becomes, perhaps, the most rational political orientation and ideology yet to exist.

one cannot 'learn' this or discover this. one has to become it... or rather, it becomes you as it became me.

Zoot Allures wrote:i have debunked the tower of babel bit in the bible. here's what happened. being unaware that humans evolved and moved to different regions over thousands of years, the folks who wrote/recorded/reported the babel incident text that would later become part of the bible knew of no other way to understand why there were different peoples speaking different languages throughout the middle eastern region at the time. so, being anthropologically and geographically illiterate, one of them came up with the cockamamie theory that god musta split everyone up at some definite point in history. then they thought "but why would he do that?", and then, naturally, the conclusion: "ah, folks musta pissed god off somehow, that's why."

just thought you should know.

the detail about the building of the tower, specifically, i'm not sure about. they coulda come up with any number of narratives to explain how folks pissed god off and why he split everybody up.

oh, and did you know that in a catholic bible i was messing with, a group of fifty some theologian scholars got together and unanimously agreed that the flood incident mentioned in the old testament was literally adopted from the epic of gilgamesh? like i always heard this, but i was surprised to find the scholars admitting it. seriously?

priest: "btw, that flood incident... totally ripped off from sumerian mythology, but that doesn't make the bible any less plausible"

suppose there was such a flood for argument sake. shouldn't we believe the storyline details about it in the epic of gilgamesh instead of the bible? what if it was the way the sumerians described it and nothing like the bible describes it? like you can't just adopt something from another story and then change it all around to suit you.

when i was in court accepting the plea arrangement, i was asked to swear to tell the truth and put my hand on the bible. i told the judge i'd be lying if i put my hand on the bible and promised not to lie because i was afraid of lying after putting my hand on the bible. there was a sustained moment of awkward silence throughout the courtroom. did that dude just say that? yeah, he said it alright. what now? do the alternative thing where you just ask him if he swears to tell the truth. kay.

how can the very integrity and foundation of the practice of positive law in this country depend solely on the supposition that if there were something that could guarantee a person would tell the truth, it would be a religious document written by a bunch of illiterate bronze-age desert tribesmen a few thousand years ago who tell us we shall burn in a lake of fire and brimstone after we die (probably another rip-off; the greek's hades, i'm sure) if we lie?

Zoot Allures wrote:critics of the materialistic theory claim that instead of being aware of physical occurences in the brain, we are aware of sensations, feelings and thoughts. they seem to be saying that because we have no direct observation of this reducibility of mental states to physical states, it therefore doesn't exist. this is a fallacious criticism. a second person point of view could observe the physical states in someones brain and correlate them to the mental states being experienced, i.e., joe feels happy while brain is in state x. the problem here is not a correspondence problem, but a causal problem; is brain state x actually the cause of joe feeling happy. unfortunately this cannot be known for the reasons hume put forth. the contiguity of events does not prove a causal connection between them.

there is a much better criticism than this: if the materialistic theory were true, the theory itself would be nothing but another set of physical events in the brain... and, any alternative theory would be merely be some other mental event. if that's the case, how can one event in the brain constitute the truth, while another would constitute a falsehood?

an 'event' is neither true nor false. it either is or isn't. it can be true that an event happened, or false that it happened, but if it happened, it would have to be true. therein lies the problem. theories of the mind are events, and therefore always true. but two different theories can't both be right (true).

discuss.

2.

Zoot Allures wrote:only two people wrote me the entire time i was in the joint. turd and phoneutria. turd wrote once but didn't put a return address on the envelope, so they wouldn't let me have it. after i was released on wednesday i finally read it... while sitting in front of a harris teeter waiting for a taxi to take me to the bus station. it was a profound and edifying experience. he had copied some stuff from a wikipedia article on some skeptics. sextus empiricus and another dude... agrippa or something like that. might discuss some of it with him later if i hear from him again.

phoneutria, on the other hand, maintained contact with me my whole bid, and, bless her soul, bought me some goodies to eat every month. she even bought me books and clothes. don't know what i woulda done without her. probably woulda started extorting the inmates for their commissary, i dunno.

now check this out. what i am about to relate to you should blow your mind.

once in a while phoneutria would include in her letters a little doodle of something (she's a great artist), and i would tear out pictures from national geographics and put quote bubbles above the characters, and send the picture with my letters to her. well this one time she drew a picture of two blue footed boobies standing beside each other and one says comically to the other 'what are they looking at?' or something like that. can't remember exactly what it was.

now check this out. the day before i got that letter (maybe it was two days, can't remember), i shit you not, i tore a picture of two blue footed boobies out of a national geographic, which i was going to send to her... with one booby saying to the other 'why don't you take a picture?' i swear to god i'm not lying. they were exactly the same size and in the same position, standing beside each other, as in her doodle.

now how do you explain that? talk about non-local causality and spooky action at a distance! what are the chances of that happening?

i don't think she believed me.. and you probably don't believe me either. i think i telepathically transmitted the image of the boobies i had in my mind, to her.

Zoot Allures wrote:scene: joes dies and is standing before god's court for judgement.

god: i gave you the choice to believe in me, and you chose not to.

joe: what? that's ridiculous. first of all, there isn't any freewill, and second, the evidence you provided for your existence is dubious.

god: are you saying you couldn't choose to believe in me?

joe: that's precisely what I'm saying. you're omniscient, right? you created the universe and the laws by which it worked. this means that you made the universe work a certain way, and also knew prior to any future state, what events would happen.

god: yeah, so?

joe: what do you mean 'so?' do you not understand what this implies? how ironic that i have to explain this to you. listen man. you know everything that was and will be, right?

god: yes

joe: and eveything you know is true; meaning, you can't know something that is false, you can't be wrong, as that would mean you weren't omniscient.

god: yeah, sounds right.

joe: okay then. so, if you know that in three minutes i'm going to go to the restroom, i'm not free to not go to the restroom in three minutes, because if i was, it would mean that you were mistaken about what you thought was going to happen. if that's the case, you wouldn't be omniscient.

god: damn

joe: see what i mean now?

god: yeah, i see. well still you chose to go to the restroom because you didn't know you were going to go, nor that you had to.

joe: that's irrelevant. the point is, YOU knew. it doesn't matter that i didn't know and felt like i chose to do so. it can't be an act of freewill if you had already predetermined it to happen, regardless of what i think or do.

god: hmm

joe: it's logic dude, and you can't violate the rules of logic.

god: sure i can. i designed them, i can break them.

joe: then make a circular triangle, or create a married man that's a bachelor. g'head, see if you can do it.

god: *looks away, embarrassed*

joe: that's what i thought. anyway, don't tell me i had a choice. that's horseshit.

god: well whatever. you still coulda believed in me.

joe: yeah right. like i'm gonna believe some wing-nut who says you spoke to him on a mountain or while meditating in the desert. that's not proof, dude. you wanna prove you exist, give me an experience that i'd not be able to explain with ordinary terms. your problem is, no experience of you could be ruled out as not being an hallucination, nor would a paranormal experience necessarily denote that christianity was true rather than, say, shintoism or zoroastrianism.

god: i see what you mean. hadn't thought of that, actually.

joe: no kidding. so what's the verdict then? hurry up, i got shit to do.

god: uh, tell you what. i won't send you to hell, but i won't let you into heaven either.

joe: that's fucked up, bro.

2.

Zoot Allures wrote:motivist, deontological and consequence theories in ethics are obsolete now, so you objectivist folks need to start over and rebuild.

you can no longer place moral facts within the rubric of naturalism or nonnaturalism; moral judgements are neither reducible to concepts in the natural sciences, nor can they be true while not being reducible to the natural sciences. damned if you do, damned if you don't.

at best you can make old school virtue ethics (like nieztsche's and aristotle's) commensurate with emotivist theory. emotivism agrees with a naturalistic form of subjectivism, but that's all you get; moral judgements are about one's feelings... not about descriptions of one's feelings. there's a difference. instead, they are expressions of one's feelings, like when you sigh with satisfaction and relief while reading my posts.

plato was wrong (about the ideal of absolute good), kant was wrong (about the duty), and mill was wrong (about the consequence), but they made decent attempts to make ethics an objective subject of study. what has to be acknowledged before proper ethics can be done is the inequality of people, and this is a helluva step to take in a world where people are afraid to accept that fact.

what is 'good' or 'right' for me might not be 'good' or 'right' for you, in categorical imperative terms. hypothetical imperative terms, sure, but that's it.

so you might as well tighten up because carnap, stevenson, and ayer pretty much put the icing on the cake that egoists like nietzsche and stirner had already baked.

you can have this cake and eat it to, if you have the courage to face the facts. this is not the end of ethics, but a new beginning. you'll do fine with a little encouragement.

3.

Zoot Allures wrote:

Sauwelios wrote:[Amsterdam, 15 April 2011]

Dear Laurence [Lampert],

Having finished How Philosophy Became Socratic since we last corresponded, and being in the process of rereading Nietzsche's Teaching, I have a question. In the latter, you seem to argue that all the genuine philosophers---"ye who are wisest"---from at least Socrates (and including him) to (but excluding) Nietzsche have been driven by the spirit of revenge. However, in HPBS, you seem to argue that all genuine philosophers are really---albeit secretly---driven by good will toward time (toward "being as fecund becoming"---HPBS p. 417), not by ill will against it. So my question is: did you change your mind somewhere between writing your first and your latest book, or is this only a seeming contradiction and have I not read you well enough? Might one say that the Socratic philosophers have only pretended to be motivated by the spirit of revenge (in other words, that they have only cloaked themselves in the cocoon of asceticism)? If so, Nietzsche's judgment of Socrates (e.g., in "The Problem of Socrates" in TI) was wrong, wasn't it?

[...]

bingo! i've always said this, though never as eloquently as you would have said it. i think lampert would agree as well if this problem were explained in new terms. what nietzsche was reacting to was the effects of socratic dialectics, NOT the intent. the effect was revolutionary; recall nietzsche saying that to hold and defend one's opinions in public was considered indecent for the noble greeks. nietzsche was disturbed by this new notion that the nobility was expected to 'explain' themselves to the sophist antagonists, and that as a result of the 'games of logical debate', there was an undermining of their instincts. but the intent of socrates (unlike the relativistic sophists) was to examine arguments for the sake of clarifying them, and because socrates DID believe in the platonic ideas (absolutes), his intents and efforts were no different than the nobles whom he argued with; like them, he too was following his instinct. socrates was not guilty of nietzsche's condemnations in this sense. rather he simply acted as a catalyst for strenghtening the understanding of the nobles pertaining to their own ideas. the dialectical 'knife thrusts' of socrates, as nietzsche described them, were not filled with animosity, although of course he felt the satisfaction of confounding his opponents. that's only natural.

For the record: Lampert did agree. Also, I don't think Socrates believed in the Platonic Ideas, and I'm pretty sure Lampert doesn't, either.

4.

Zoot Allures wrote:plato was correct in his assertion that nobody intentionally does 'wrong', and that if they knew what was 'right' they would do it. what he wasn't correct about was his assertion that there IS 'what is good', in his platonic ideal absolutist sense.

what people do is neither right nor wrong, but only effective or not. the efficacy of action is its motivation, something that is mostly unconscious, not some conscious intention to do what is 'right'.

the spinozean capacity to act is the only feature of intentionality that is real. what is 'moral' is the increase and improvement of one's effectiveness, one's movement, one's activity, and there exists a plane of immanence in which everyone (individual quanta of power) interacts as this happens.

how can 'that blockhead john stuart mill' (nietzsche) know what will result from an action when he cannot see three steps ahead? and the pragmatists? the 'cash value' of an act can never be determined; when do i cash in my act? what i call true has worked for me today... but what about tomorrow, or the next day, or the next? what if something bad happens to me next week as a result of what i did today?

plato was right and wrong as long as you understand that he didn't believe there was a universally applicable moral criterion for all people. he BEGAN his moral theory with the premise that there is no equality. the aristocrat is not bound by the same conditions as the pleb.

in the meno dialogue, socrates claims that we can't acquire knowledge through learning. he held the platonic thesis that one cannot learn a truth that one does not already know since they would not recognize it as a result of their not knowing it. and you are familiar with the theory of recollection; one cannot learn what one does know since they already know it. socrates concludes that we don't learn anything- we remember what we already know. such knowledge must be of the platonic forms or universals, according to them both.

am i mistaken?

He's not, except that's only the exoteric message of the Meno. Finding its esoteric message would require close examination of the Greek text(s). Strauss held lecture courses on it and probably also wrote about it, but he himself spoke and wrote exoterically, so reading his writings and lecture transcripts would only make the task so much easier.

2.

Zoot Allures wrote:"plato was correct in his assertion that nobody intentionally does 'wrong', and that if they knew what was 'right' they would do it."

you might get the wrong idea about this statement in its context so i wanna explain what's going on here, i think.

'wrong' does not mean- or doesn't have to mean, i should say- what is considered disobedience to laws or mores or codes of conduct, for these things cannot get past the is/ought problem... the naturalistic fallacy.

to act 'right' requires that one knows what is 'right' first, and, since one cannot know what is 'right', one can't act competently. there's a hidden premise here. only competent action can be 'right' or 'wrong' action. having knowledge of 'right' and 'wrong' in an imperative sense is not possible anyway, so there's no platonic 'idea' of what is right and wrong. even if there was it would be inaccessable.

when someone justifies what they do, so that they can believe they are doing 'good', they cannot ever know they ought to do what they're doing (as an imperative). it could be the case that what they're doing is actually wrong and only seems right.

insofar that plato meant by 'right action' an ethically motivated action, he was confused. central to his idea of ethics was the notion that a person must understand what they are doing.. or as they put it, 'giving an account' of the reasons why one acts as they do.. else they are acting autonomously and arbitrarily.. and such acts can't be moral.knowing what 'ought' to be done is required to qualify an act as moral and therefore capable of being 'right' or 'wrong' in the first place, see.

what plato meant, but didn't know he could only mean, was that people do what they think they should do, and in this very act of intention and purpose do they justify the act itself. being 'right' is only to have comprehension and understanding of one's reasons as far as one understands one's reasons.

petitio principii, i know. there's no other way to say it without writing a book on phenomenology, and i won't do that. think of voluntary behavior as hypothetically categorical in the way that it is end-oriented and motivistic, meaning that an action is qualified to be called 'right' or 'wrong' insofar as that means competently or incompetently... purposely or arbitarily.

everyone acts 'rightly' because they act willfully. they might regret what they did later, but that won't be because they discovered the act was morally 'wrong'. one can't possibly know that so it's a moot point.

the murderer who murders either murders because they were acting consciously and purposely and of their own volition, or because they were sleepwalking. the former is 'right' action, the latter, no action at all, and 'wrong' action is impossible.

Again, I'm not so sure that Plato was "confused" or didn't know what "he could only mean". Anyway, I guess I agree with the gist of this (though as Nietzsche says in BGE 32 one may also judge actions, not by their consequences or the intentions behind them, but by what's unintentional about them). However, I think it doesn't get us anywhere, since there are then only right actions or no actions. Now in my "Nature and God are History" OP, I made the following suggestion:

"What morality, then, can be based on all this? To be as noble as nature, we have to be _indifferent_ as to the direction of obedience; the old custom, religion, laws, state is nobler than the young, as long as it endures."

This suggests that "wrong" does mean "what is considered disobedience to laws or mores or codes of conduct"... I've explored this idea further in my "Insightful analysis of Dawn 113 thread:

"With this, we arrive at the book's fundamental idea, that moral goodness is only obedience to custom (aphorism 9). And we may consider obedience to custom natural, no matter how 'unnatural', how arbitrary a custom it is: after all, we can conceive of physical laws as laws that are always obeyed and hence completely natural (=physical). [...] Nature is beautiful and good and just because it obeys[.]"

"The only true source of morality is human will. Acknowledge this, affirm this, will this, and you're on my side. Deny this, and you deserve to succumb to Islam or the like. At least Islam is a more consistent form of that denial. (The most consistent form is tribalism, e.g. pre-Babylonian Captivity Judaism. A return to that would be my second choice, after the Nietzschean enlightenment.)"